Category Archives: Conditional Formatting

The picture to the right shows a table with some sales figures for July. There’s nothing wrong with the table as it is, but I find it very hard to read and make sense of it. There are just a lot of numbers and dates, and you can’t even distinguish between weekdays and weekends. If we could highlight the weekends (or weekdays) it would be a lot easier to read these numbers. In this example I want to highlight the Saturdays and Sundays. Here’s how we’ll do it:

This is a very useful trick if you have a report showing dates and budget figures, and you want to make it more readable by making the future dates less visible.

Take a look at the report to the right. Assuming today’s date is 7/10, we want the dates from 7/1 through 7/10 to be easy to read, while the dates in the future should be hidden or greyed out. The trick is to not only dim the dates, but also the other columns on the same rows. This is an easy trick that you can apply on any report you get your hands on! Here’s how to do it:

Is there an easy way to locate and highlight duplicates in a list in Excel?

If you just want to remove the duplicates, the easiest way is to use the Advanced Filter or the built-in Remove Duplicates feature on the Data ribbon, but what if you want to find the duplicates in the list, keep them and highlight them with a different colour? That almost sounds like a job for a professional Excel consultant, but there’s no need for that – you can easily do it yourself! I’ll show you one easy way and one super-easy way:

If you want to highlight a cell in Excel based on its value, it’s pretty straight forward: Just choose Conditional Formatting from the Home ribbon. But what if you want to highlight the entire row based on the value in just one of the cells? We’ll use Conditional Formatting here too, but with a slightly different approach than we’re used to.

This is what we want: Choose one of the names in the table below and highlight the entire row for each occurence of that name.

An Excel table with a lot of numbers in it can be difficult to read. Often, a lot of the numbers are zeros, and it is sometimes a good idea to hide them in order to make the important numbers more visible. Of course, you could write IF-formulas that return nothing if the result is zero, but usually the way I am going to show here is better and easier.

We will use Conditional Formatting to highlight the fields that match the search string. For example, if you look at the table below, we want to highlight row 8, 11, 15 and 25 if we search for “RG”, because “RG” is part of the product name in those rows.